


Memoirs of the Wolf

by Apostat3



Category: Dungeons & Dragons (Roleplaying Game)
Genre: Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition, Fantasy, M/M, Original Character(s), Western
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-21
Updated: 2019-05-21
Packaged: 2020-03-09 03:31:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,729
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18908659
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Apostat3/pseuds/Apostat3
Summary: The life of a famous outlaw in the Wild Badlands of Osse.





	Memoirs of the Wolf

_By Morgan Holland_

 

 

My life is not one to be romanticised, turned to legend or envied. True, while many long for the lawless life of the outlaw, the life that I led, I find they often neglect to mention all of the grittier, horrific and depressing faculties of it. So here, in these memoirs, I seek to document my old life, the story of the so called Wolf and the rest of my ‘pack’ , the way it all truly happened. Harsh realities, heartbreaking emotions and all. No detail is to be overlooked, as each is as important as the other in understanding why we lived like we did, and why I not only put my old guns down, but also sought to put the old guns down.

To understand how I ended up in this life in the first place, one must look back to the very beginning of my life. I never knew either of my parents. For all I know, they were a couple of peasants having a drunken fling behind the tavern, and that honestly seems like the most probable option. It might surprise some to know that I wasn’t even born on the outback island nation of Osse, but back on the mainland. This was where I first crossed paths with Darr Underwood, the man who would go on to lead our little band. He and his partner, Ada Miller - a healer-, were travelling down a small forest trail, far from any other civilisation. It was late into the night, and yet they spotted - Elves have keen eyes in the dark, you see, and our entire band including these two would turn out to be elves of varying descriptions - an infant left by the roadside, presumably a present to the local wolves or perhaps even a Leshy. I used to believe that Darr and Ada decided to bring me with them together for, even as cold-blooded murderers, surely they could not bring themselves to see a child abandoned and ride on. Now, however, I can safely say that if Darr ever did wish to take me, he now wishes he did not. Ada, however, was a sweet, kind woman, and readily took me up and kept me as if her own. Strangely, they did not wish to name me after themselves, even though at this point not a soul cared for it, nor was there a single copper offered upon them. However, choose to name me differently they did, and thus Morgan Holland was truly born. 

From the way Darr told it, the couple were poor and roaming to try and find a job and a home. They were desperate, and so this is why they travelled to Osse. I remember that Ada, however, always told me that they were very happy, and only went to Osse because the couple had always enjoyed a sense of adventure, and nothing offers adventure quite like a new, untamed land. Which was true? A mix of both, I suspect, though probably leaning towards Darr’s tale. I remember being told that Ada was a dreamer back then.

 

Arriving in Osse, my surrogate parents found themselves a quiet spot in the woods somewhere remote, where they constructed a small home together. Darr allowed them to live off the land, hunting for food each day and gathering whatever other essentials they may have needed from the untouched wilds around them. Ada, on the other hand, focused on raising the Wolf pup they had found, teaching me everything you might expect a parent to and more, despite not having the first clue who I really was. I still do not even know myself, but looking back on it now, I realise it does not even really matter. I had become their child. I still am. I think of that often now, when I reflect on the events yet to come. I wonder, did Darr ever truly feel like a family, or was it simply an illusion the whole time?

 

A good half decade was spent living this way. My childhood and early life constituted purely to that one shack and the surrounding environment. Ada always said it was like a dream, and I am inclined to agree. Despite this, Darr was never content. He believed we deserved more; however, what he meant was that he saw others more successful than him and felt burningly jealous. He could not build himself the riches others were beginning to find from sticks and plants, and so he devised a plan to simply take it, instead.

 

It was just stagecoaches at first. With stagecoaches, he said, it was only the very richest who we were taking from, and they certainly did not need as much as they had. They would get along comfortably anyway, despite this. I find it strange that Ada allowed this to happen. I do wonder, at first, if he did not tell her, but instead waited until we were too far committed and she could not stop him. It suppose it is pointless to wonder now, however, for trying to understand Darr Underwood is an insurmountable task, and one I shall not be able to do here. All I can offer on this man is pure speculation, and indeed he cannot confirm nor deny for me. 

I was around 60 when he took me on my first robbery. Ada never participated, you see, she simply kept our home and later our camp operational. Anything you have heard otherwise about her is slander; she was the best of us, and I will hear nothing else of it. On our robberies, Darr used pistols, a relatively little used technology at the time and apparently inherited through gambling on the mainland a long time ago. I would ask where he had been gambling in order to acquire them, but I don’t imagine you picked this book up to find out the backstory of ordinary guns much deeper than I have already stated. The robberies were a thrilling experience. In my life, I had had no contact with anyone but Ada and Darr, and so it was not only exhilarating to do something I knew was wrong, but also just to see so many different people. Yet, across the whole island, of all the stagecoaches and points on its route, who would imagine that we would hold one up at the same time as another pair of crooks?

 

I was around 100, maybe, when we met Amber Pearce and Maya John. Anyway who has been to Osse in the past 350 years has doubtless heard these names at least in passing, falling from fearful lips. Darr and I were holding up the stagecoach when out they came to in turn hold us up. It was their mark, they said, they had been tracking it a long time. Furthermore, they thought they deserved the contents more than we did. However, Darr was an eloquent man, a natural diplomat, and convinced them to divide up the loot between us, as we had done the hard work and yet their effort also meritted some reward. It took some convincing, and there were several points where I imagined they would simply run Darr through and be done with it. This did not happen. By some stroke of good fortune for Darr and I, and in rather bad luck for the rich of Osse indeed, they agreed to this and even took up Darr’s offer to rob with us some time. This was the beginning of a prosperous relationship between us and them, and I suppose could be considered the moment of formation for our criminal band.

 

With more people, Darr decided we should be hitting bigger targets, as that was what was needed to keep individual takes high after we split whatever we took. Darr assumed the role of our leader quite naturally, and I was always and still am surprised how easily Maya allowed this. She was always something of a loose cannon, you see; efficient and useful but very dangerous. She quite easily meritted her title as a Coyote.  Amber was a somewhat more measured person; at least, as much as you could expect from a criminal, anyway. She became known as the Snake - stealthy and highly deadly. We all had these names so we could address each other without revealing our identities during a job. It is somewhat harder to find the Wolf on local ledgers than Morgan Holland. Ada was occasionally referred to as our wise Owl, but this was not very common as she did not come on jobs with us. Darr, of course, was the Lion. Overly proud, savage and fierce. That was us. A strange family of misfits taking what they desired from those who could afford to lose it. Those were the best years of my life, those early years, before things started to go wrong.

 

Our ‘reign of terror’ must have been a few hundred years long, all things considered. Reckon I’m somewhere close to 500 now - maybe in 20 years or so - so we must have kept going good for around 300 years. Which, all things considered, is a pretty good run of things; Almost a third of a usual elven lifetime. I would be around 400, then, when things started to go wrong. Over the previous years, I had noticed the others had been developing more and more needlessly violent tendencies. Well, to be fair, it was more that Darr and Maya were. Amber was more akin to myself than them, in that while we didn’t necessarily agree with it all, we went along with it almost unquestioningly. In the years that had past, we even had another addition to our group. Darr and Ada had finally had their own child, little Rosetta Underwood, and it was unavoidable that she be eventually brought into it all. At the time when things began to boil over, she was just shy of 100. 

You see, arguments had become more and more common within our ranks, and this had a very tangible effect on how we conducted ourselves as a group. Darr and Maya would argue often, with myself usually taking Darr’s side and Amber taking Maya’s by default. As such, most issues went unresolved and the anger they felt from that boiled over into how they dealt with people. They killed more than they should. They killed when it wasn’t the only option. They began to target those who weren’t fortunate enough to bounce back from being targeted. But despite all this, Darr was my family, and I wasn’t about to betray or let down family. So instead I just went along with it, same as everyone, until something happened and it was too late to take it all back.

 

We must have had a particularly bad job or something, because tensions were as high as they’d ever been at camp that night. Darr and Maya had just concluded quite the argument and both of them were seething, right on the edge. I knew that any attempt to talk to either was folly and that it would only start another argument, but like I said before, Ada was an optimist.

She went to Darr and tried to talk to him about how jobs had been going lately. She had heard from me about the increase in violence and bloodshed, and she believed she could help to turn it all around. I knew she couldn’t, of course, but I couldn’t just bring myself to tell her that.

When she tried to speak to him, to make him see, he just lost it. I’ve never seen him quite like that, not before and not after, but he just flew into this flurry of rage. Started berating her about how she was in no position to judge, since she was never out on any jobs so how could she possibly know? The camp was very tense. Everyone’s hands were slowly falling towards their weapons. And just then - just at the point of highest tensions and anger - Ada made her last mistake.

She threatened to leave.

This caught Darr by surprise, certainly, and it only served to fuel his rage further. He was seeing red, screaming and shouting, when his rage transformed into bloodlust. His hands fell to his guns and in the blink of an eye he shot her dead. Just like that. As though she were a stranger he had never met. I couldn’t believe it, but I didn’t have to. My reaction was instinctual anyway. Immediately, I fired upon him, and was fired upon by Maya, who was followed blindly by Amber. I could see I was outnumbered and by any account outclassed, so I was surprised to find I had any ally at all. Yet, I had one. 

 

Rosetta was lucky enough to be like me, in that she was more like Ada than Darr. She saw things my way, and I think it was her convictions, her beliefs, and brought her to my side. She believed in a better world, just like her mother, and she was more than happy to fight for it.

 

Frankly, I’m still surprised today that not one person was killed in the subsequent shootout. Seeing we didn’t stand a chance if we stayed, Rosetta and I made steady progress backwards, pulling away from the camp and those within, who seemed to have no interest in following us. We fled to the nearest town in which, thank the Gods, we had not committed any notable crimes yet. We found shelter there for a time, then moved on in the following days. Both of us were keen to put as much distance between us and them as was possible for us. We were safe, it seemed, to flee and leave that life behind.

But we both knew that wasn’t enough.

 

Ada was Rosetta’s mother, and was for all purposes a mother to me. Darr, on the other hand, was my father no longer. The man I had known so long ago was gone, or perhaps he was simply an illusion all this time. Either way, neither of us were satisfied to let our mother’s killer go free, nor his accomplices. But Rosetta was young, and still had the option of a better life. I held up a few small stores and carts to get a bit of coin, then set her up to live while I was gone. I promised her I would hunt the lot of them, do what had to be done. And unlike some men I have known, I intended to keep my word.

 

The gang had split, as far as the information I could glean went. They had tried to stay together, but without Ada, myself and Rosetta to help balance them, the arguments grew worse and worse until they could stay together no longer. The first of them I was able to track was Maya. Seemingly she hadn’t gone far, deciding to stay in the area she knew for she thought she could operate best there. That was her downfall, you see; I knew exactly how she did everything here, so it was easy to follow the hallmarks of her work straight back to her. It was while hunting Maya that I met the only person not from our gang that I could ever call a friend: Ander Wintermere.

 

Wintermere is a strange but honest man, I have found. As I understand it - which is to say, not very well - he belongs to some sort of organisation who track and police the activities of other-worldly beings in our plane of existence; things such as Demons, Devils, Fey and Celestials all fall under their jurisdiction. When I informed him of what I was doing, following no small amount of coaxing - done in no gentle manner, I might add - He informed me that he too was looking for Maya, as seemingly she had begun to consort with Demons in the few months or so it took me to find her. How very typically Maya, I thought. Wintermere then suggested we work together. I was wary, of course, as you would be of any ally after what I had experienced, but I ended up agreeing. As it turned out, I probably wouldn’t have succeeded without Wintermere, and so I am very grateful to him for that. With his help - for it seemed that Wintermere was an experienced tracker, with some magical aid - we located Maya fairly soon.

 

I will not have it said that I am an unfair man. I had set out with every intention of letting each member of the gang speak their piece before I decided upon their fate. But there was something in seeing this horrid woman, who I have no doubt played some part in the pollution of Darr’s mind, with her lackies out in the woods, dealing in the occult, that broke something in me. I didn’t have to think twice, didn’t hesitate, before raising my rifle and firing into the crowd. I missed, of course, because my fury did not allot me time to aim, and began a firefight between myself and Wintermere against her and a group of demons. Her followers, it seemed, had not the same mettle, and quickly fled. The fight took nowhere near as long as I might have anticipated. Wintermere was thorough and effective in his methodical killing of the demons. It had every mark of a man who had done it a thousand times and to this day I have no reason to believe he has not done that several times over. This left me simply to tackle Maya. This battle, I think, is the most important of my life, for it taught me one thing which I carry into any and every fight I enter now: restraint. You see, both of us fought with rifles, and a very important aspect of using a rifle is aim. Maya, however, fought with anger. Anger does not easily allow for discipline or skill. During our fight, I fought with the very same thing, and so I attribute it to chance that I got her before she got me. However, by reflecting on this fact, I learned to develop from it. This, I believe, is the most essential thing a warrior can possibly do. I almost regretted that I had killed Maya so cleanly, with a single shot before I could speak to her, but when I voiced this to Ander, he simply told me that sometimes it is better that way. Years later now, reflecting upon these words, I am inclined to agree with him.

Wintermere and I spoke much that night. For some reason even I cannot explain, I told him everything about myself. My whole story, just as I am telling you now. He didn’t say a word throughout, and back then this almost angered me, as though he didn’t think my life was worthy of even a momentary opinion. I know now, of course, that he was simply listening to me because there was nothing to say. He understood as well as I did what I had to do to find peace, and so he didn’t need to say a word. 

 

I had thought that after that, we would part ways. He would go back to his mission and I to mine. For some reason, however, he deigned to stay and help me to track Amber and Darr. Maybe he pitied me? Maybe he wished to see justice done? Either way, I was and am very grateful for his help. 

 

The next trail we picked up was Amber’s. Naturally, she couldn’t pry herself very far from Maya’s side, even after the split, and we found that she had established her territory no more than a few good day’s ride from Maya’s. She had always understood the value of subtlety far better than Maya, so it took us far longer  to pinpoint where it was she was hiding. However, presumably as part of the skill set acquired by being an interdimensional policeman, Wintermere demonstrated investigatory skills far beyond my own and set us on the right track. This time, there was nothing so dramatic as a slew of demons or even a gang of thugs. Just a lone wanderer, matching Amber’s description and temperament, robbing the occasional coach or traveller to get by. This was the point in my journey when I started to question what I was doing. Amber, it seemed, was meek. Was she so deserving of my fury, my revenge? This concern I did not choose to share with Wintermere. He had seen enough weakness from me already. I just kept going, kept hunting, telling myself I would make the right call when the time came. That I would know what was right. I put a little too much faith in myself there, I think.

 

It took a while, but eventually we tracked her down to her “hideout”. Realistically, it was simply a ridge on which she had decided to pitch her tent and start her fire. You would never have given a second thought to the notion that perhaps this was the den of a once widely feared criminal. I asked Wintermere to stay back for this part; simply watch out for me and provide assistance either at my signal or if it was apparent it was needed. I’m certain Amber heard my approach, but she didn’t respond. She simply stared out over the valley we were situated above, watching the sun creep lower and lower, closer and closer to the horizon. I stood just behind her, with my gun coming involuntarily to my hand. I didn’t even think about it, really. She was sat on the very edge of the ridge, just silently staring, seeming serene. I think any man thinking logically might have spared her. She was no threat to anyone anymore, and she hadn’t really participated in the killing of Ada at all. But when I saw Amber, Ada was all I could think of. Ada, and revenge. I suppose I didn’t even really realise I had put the gun against her head and slowly pulled the trigger until I heard the sound, and leaned over to watch her limp body fall down to the ground far below. I had no need to kill her. I had no real reason, if I’m perfectly honest. But I did. And she is the only one I regret killing in my whole, long life. 

 

It came as no surprise to me to find that Darr had started a new gang, when we eventually heard word of him a few weeks later. We had simply wandered from place to place, small settlement to small settlement, following a trail of haphazard crime and unnecessary bloodshed. I really knew Darr had lost it now. After all, I had just experienced the kind of blind rage that makes you kill unnecessary, the numb pain, and to know that he was now feeling that constantly was concerning. It made me.. Well, not understand him. I don’t know what made him feel like this while we were together. But I felt I knew him more. Felt I was more ready to face him and end this whole thing, I suppose. Wintermere also seemed keen to finish this sooner rather than later. I’d guess he was putting off some task he was supposed to be doing instead to help me and, while I have not the first idea why he decided to do so, I am very grateful for it. 

Darr was far easier to track. His gang was quite numerous, maybe 15 or 20 people, so staying undetected was something of a challenge for them, especially from the likes of Wintermere and myself. He had found some old fortress in the woods, we discovered, and was holed up inside. Wintermere suggested several plans to infiltrate, or lure him out, but I remained dead set on a direct assault. Let them come, I had said, and test their mettle against a real killer, a real criminal. While I do not believe Wintermere was entirely behind the idea, he did recognise that I could not be swayed, and thus he relented, agreeing to help me in my efforts. We went in that same night.

 

I will not describe what I did during the ensuing shootout. I will not detail how many I killed, or how I killed them, but I will say the battle was harsh, bloody, savage and base. I do not withhold this information by reader discretion, but rather that I am ashamed of the things I did. In the end, however, the only remaining combatants were myself and Darr. Wintermere had been wounded, so I had sent him back to save himself, rather than continue to push and lose his life. I am glad he is such a sensible man, for he knew the severity of his wound and thus agreed to this. All that remained was Darr and myself. 

 

The sun was beginning to set.

 

He gave some grand speech, I remember, though I will spare the delusional and hypocritical details. He said I had betrayed him, betrayed the family, and that I deserved what would come next. I told him I wished I could forget him and move on but that I knew it was impossible. I told him he deserved what would come next.

 

I was always a faster draw than Darr.

 

With the battle over and Darr dead, my mission was over. My revenge had been acquired. But I felt not a thing. The only difference between the beginning of my quest and the end? I had fewer bullets now, and no purpose. I had shaped my life around Darr Underwood. For the past year I had hunted him and his associates and poured everything I had into the endeavour. Now it was done, I had nothing. Nothing but one bullet left in my gun. For the one final member of our gang. Our family. The wolf.

 

I saw the sun dip below the horizon. 

 

I remember how strikingly cold the barrel felt. I remember how strikingly cold I felt, in that moment, as everything left my body. My spirit. My soul. I was ready, in that frozen moment, to finally conclude my tale, and the tale of our gang. I probably would have, if I am to be honest, if not for Ander Wintermere.

 

It was not the words Wintermere said that brought me back. It was no what he told me about the value of life, and love, and all sorts. It was because in that moment, I had the understanding. The understanding that this man had never given up on me. He had given up many other things, in fact, to stay with me over my whole journey, and now even when he was wounded and in mortal danger, he was by my side. That was what brought the gun down again. An unspoken understanding.

 

That morning, the sun rose again. As it always does. Always will.

 

I set off home the day after. I had been away a year, and missed Rosetta sorely. Wintermere departed, and for the sake of the confidentiality of his mission, I shall not disclose to where in this book. I understood, however, that his task was paramount, and why he had to leave my side at last. My only regret was that I did not accompany him. 

 

It was been about 4 years since these events transpired, as of writing. I imagine that if you live in the area Darr’s gang occupied, you still hear stories occasionally about the bloodbath. If so, I ask you to forget about those stories. They are not what is important. I am sure that, if you have made it this far into my story, you understand this now. This is very much a cautionary tale, about the vices of revenge, but also a message about kinship and compassion. I hope you take at least some of these ideas away from this. This is the true story of the Wolf, of the life on the run, steeped in evil and hatred. I do not know what I hope to achieve by writing this, but I hope that this story find some purpose to someone, somewhere.


End file.
